The Sound of Seas (18 page)

“Skett, slow down!” Mikel shouted back. “This is getting very real very fast!”

“Dr. Jasso?” Dr. Cummins yelled.

“I'm all right!” he shouted into the radio.

Mikel looked down. He blinked hard, not convinced that he was seeing correctly. In front of the woman the blackness seemed to glow with a blue blush. The color took on more prominence and then Mikel saw what looked like white streaks, black streaks—

White caps, sea creatures
, he suddenly realized.
The woman is sitting at the edge of the ocean. The cooing is—sea creatures.

Just then, Mikel was distracted by something new: smoke, rising from the toga's folds. Licks of red began to appear through the fabric along the shoulders, the waist, down the spine. The same thing must be happening on Skett's end, which was probably why Flora was agitated.

“Skett, she's starting to burn!” Mikel shouted. “The tile is killing her!”

“In the past!”
Skett screamed with almost giddy triumph.

“Did you hear me? You're killing someone
there
!”

“She's already dead!” Skett yelled. “The Technologists are
right
—you can transcend with the tiles! You don't need prayer!”

Mikel realized that the rising smoke was not real. Like the appari
tion, it belonged to another time. But something else was real: a band of glowing rock at the base of the pit. There was a golden hue to the band: tiles buried beneath the once-molten rock. The tile in New York and the tiles buried here had bonded through time to open a portal and connect to a woman in
this
time. There was a tower below this pit.

“Dr. Cummins, pull me up. There are tiles down here and they're becoming active!”

“Hang on!” she said.

The winch began to groan and the rope jerked up.

“Skett, is the same thing happening to Adrienne up there?” Mikel shouted as loud as he could. He waited a moment, until he was higher, then repeated the question.

“Of course! The two women are transcending together!”

“Skett—”

“I'm
freeing
them, damn you! The tile wasn't going to release them
—I
didn't do this. You did, you brought the tile back!”

“No, Skett. We could have found another way!”

“We have transcended time! We can do it again! You
used
to be a scientist, Jasso! Understanding power like this is worth a life!”

“I'm going back to the truck, Skett—”

“No! Keep recording, damn you!”

“I am,” Mikel said. “But you haven't proved Transcendence at all. All you've done is reached back in time to burn a woman to death.”

“She's been dead for forty millennia,” Skett replied.

“Something that
you
caused, Skett.”

Mikel watched as smoke rolled back from the folds of the toga and insubstantial flames began to consume the fabric, blackened the fringes of her hair, caused her arms to rise from their prayerful position and extend outward. Fire began to chew at the flesh of her upper arms, formed an ugly orange ruff around her throat, turned red skin to a brown, then black sheet of chapped flesh. Blood turned to steam and pieces of skin drifted off, ugly particles of ash riding the smoke.

Finally, the youthful face turned upward. The mouth was pulled
wide in a high scream as her cheekbones broke through charred flesh. Her eyes burst and poured from their sockets like runny eggs. Her teeth seemed to grow and grimace as her lips and mouth burned away. The cry of pain ended as fire turned her saliva to burning vapor and made speech impossible.

That was when Mikel realized that all the shrieks were not just coming from below. Some were rising from the phone.

“Goddamn you,” Mikel said, snarling into the phone. “Damn you to hell!”

Mikel looked away as the figure below him turned to ash and fell in on itself. He heard Flora's voice over the phone, then screaming as Skett shouted and probably threatened her—or worse, because after that everything was quiet. Below, the circle of tiles dulled and the winds diminished. Perhaps Skett had finally turned the tile “off” in New York.

Mikel took a moment to calm himself. His flesh was chilled from cooling perspiration. The sling had pinched under his thighs and his upper legs were numb. He adjusted his position to encourage circulation. Then he bent back toward the phone.

“Skett,” Mikel said, his voice loud in the sudden quiet. There was no answer. Mikel turned his face toward the radio. “Did you hear any of that?” he asked Dr. Cummins.

“I heard
all
of it, Dr. Jasso,” she replied. “I can't believe it.”

“It happened,” Mikel replied.

“But—
how
? There couldn't really have been someone down there with you.”

Mikel was too emotionally exhausted to answer.

“It could be a leaking pocket of ethylene gas . . . a hallucination. That would also explain what you thought you saw previously, what some of us thought we heard coming from the pillar of fire.”

“It could be but it isn't,” Mikel insisted. “I have video.”

“We'll have to review that data,” she said. “I saw nothing burning up here. Not like last time.”

“It wasn't the same,” Mikel said. “This happened forty thousand years ago.”

“But triggered now.”

“That's right.”

The archaeologist was still looking down when something abruptly changed below.

With a unity that he had not yet seen in his interactions with Galderkhaan, the tiles below reclaimed some of the luster they had had a few moments before.

“Christ, what now?” Mikel asked. “Skett, are you doing something with the tile?”

There was no answer.

“Dr. Jasso?” the glaciologist asked.

“Get me out of here,” Mikel said. “We have an emergency!”

CHAPTER 15

B
arbara Melchior arrived at the hospital at five forty-five, which was fortunate: even though Caitlin kept herself busy, lying in bed nearly caused the psychiatrist to lose her mind. Her phone was nearly dead, but she used the charge she had left to read about Antarctic geography. She was looking for reconstructions of the continent as it would have looked some forty thousand years ago. If she were able to go back, even briefly, she wanted to have some idea about where she was and where she needed to be. Anything with ice cover could be ruled out.

Barbara swept into the room with more than her usual panache: it was the satisfaction of a New Yorker having beaten the system.

“The travel gods were with me,” the psychiatrist said as she entered. “A cab was discharging at my doorstep in rush hour and the traffic was actually moving.”

She hung her coat on a hanger behind the door as she noticed Nancy O'Hara, who had been drowsing in the armchair.

“Oh—sorry if I woke you,” Barbara said, grimacing.

“It's all right,” Nancy said. She put her hands on the armrests and pushed off slowly. “I should leave you two alone anyway.”

“It was good to see you again,” Barbara said.

“And you,” Nancy said. “I wish you both luck. I'll be in the waiting area.”

“You can go home if you like, Mom,” Caitlin said. “Get some actual rest in a real bed. I'll be fine.”

“I'll wait to hear that from Dr. Yang,” Nancy said, shutting the door behind her.

Barbara looked at her patient. “Peter Yang?”

“The same,” Caitlin said. “You know him?”

“Read his full-throated defense of atypical antipsychotics and the treatment of schizophrenia,” she said. “I don't like it when GPs play in my sandbox.” Barbara came forward. She continued to regard Caitlin. “You look like you've been in a war zone.”

“That bad? I haven't looked.”

“Yeah,” Barbara said. “You want a brush?”

“No thanks. But you do have an iPhone 6, right?”

“Yeah—”

“You happen to have your power cord?” Caitlin asked, holding out her hand. “My phone is kaput.”

Barbara fetched the cable from her shoulder bag and plugged Caitlin's phone into a wall socket.

“There needs to be a study about this,” Barbara said.

“About what?”

“Why I always feel physically healthier when my dead phone starts to charge.”

“There have been lots of studies about it,” Caitlin said. “It's called dependent personality disorder.”

“It's more than that,” Barbara said. “I mean, why should energy in a device make us feel
physically
charged?”

Caitlin did not answer that. She could have.

“So,” Barbara said looking down at her friend. “Small talk duties—check. Why am I really here?”

“Regression,” Caitlin said. “I have to go back. I think Jacob is stuck in the past and there's military activity brewing in the South Pole.”

“And that's your problem how?”

“If they find or destroy or start messing with the relics under the ice, my conduit there may be damaged,” Caitlin said. “I have to try and connect, somehow. Regression may jump-start me. Nothing else is working.”

Barbara had pulled over Nancy's chair and sat in it. “Caitlin . . .”

“Barbara, it's not in my head and it's not a dream,” Caitlin told her. “I was there. Now Jacob is stuck there while his body is semicatatonic in the apartment.”

“In the
apartment
? Caitlin!”

“Don't,” Caitlin said. “Anita Carter is with him. Doctors cannot help. I can.”

“Honey, I cannot go along with that.”

“Do you think I'd risk his life if I weren't
sure
?” Caitlin asked. Their voices were rising; Caitlin brought it down. “Barbara, tell me—what would his pediatrician do? You know the drill: blood tests, check his thyroid, see if he hit his head.”

“It wouldn't hurt to begin that process, Caitlin.”

“But none of that is what's wrong with him! His spirit may be stuck forty freakin' millennia from here! How is Synthroid going to help that? I want him as quiet and “the same” as is possible, not drugged, not away from his bed. At least now I know generally where he is and
how
he is.”

Barbara considered that. The psychiatrist was always a voice of caution and devil's advocacy, but she respected her colleague/patient and was not an entirely hard sell. Caitlin knew Barbara was open to the idea of an astral “pool” of experiences, the possibility of tapping into the energies of those who came before us. If she weren't sold, at least the door was open. But Barbara also was not one to humor her patients' delusions. To her, this straddled both those possibilities.

“Barbara?” Caitlin said, reaching for her hand. “I know what I'm doing. It worked for my other patients in similar circumstances. But I need your help.”

Barbara threw up her free hand and shook her head. “I've said my piece. He's not my patient, you are.”

“Thank you.”

“And since you are, I want to go on record as saying that regression is a tool to give me information as your therapist—not for you to jump to convenient conclusions.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive.”

“They are not. But that is for me to decide,” Barbara said.

“With an open mind,” Caitlin pointed out.

Barbara's mouth twisted. “Are you done last-wording me, Dr. O'Hara?”

Caitlin nodded.

“All right, then.” Barbara fixed her dark eyes on Caitlin. “So. Your usual self-hypnosis technique . . . did not work?”

Caitlin made a face. The way she said “technique” made it sound like “trick.” “It helped me to blow up Washington Square Park.”

The dark eyes opened wider. “You're saying that was you?”

“It was, full of the same kind of power I had the first time I went back,” Caitlin told her. “But since then, something is blocking me from accessing the past. Either the host body back then is closed or dead, or it could be that the tiles are shut down. I don't know. I had a dream—or a vision, something—about a snake or snakes in a ringlike shape. I have no context for that either, except that it's similar to what I saw during a trance in Haiti.”

“Symbol of trouble? Phallus? Death?”

“No idea,” Caitlin said. “None. That's why I need help. Consider the alternative.”

“What's that?”

Caitlin whipped her hands to her sides, over the railings. “I'm gonna keep throwing my two fingers out, trying to plug into the ether, until they dislocate.”

Caitlin stopped suddenly, her left hand fully extended.

“What is it?” Barbara asked.

“I thought—I thought there was something there,” she said. Caitlin wriggled her extended fingers. “It's weak but . . . there's something, some energy.”

“You still want to do this?” Barbara asked.

Caitlin hesitated a moment longer then lowered her arms. “Yes. I do.”

Deciding there was no point in debating further, Barbara told Caitlin to lie back comfortably.

“Thank you,” Caitlin said as she snuggled back into the crisp polyurethane.

“You want me to record the session?”

“Yes, please.”

Barbara pushed the record button on her phone and placed it on the nightstand. She shut the light off, then lifted the chair and moved in even closer, so she could bend nearer to Caitlin's ear. Her smooth, low voice would be Caitlin's only connection to this world. That would leave her free to give up all other tethers, to float in her subconscious. The only light came from the monitors at Caitlin's bedside and a sliver that slashed across the floor beneath the door.

Caitlin shut her eyes and forced herself to relax.

“All right, Caitlin. You're going to answer each question with the first thing that comes to your mind,” Barbara said. “Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Where are you?”

“In a hospital room.”

“In your mind's eye, look up,” Barbara instructed. “What do you see?”

“The ceiling.”

“What do you see beyond it?”

“A room above me.”

“Who's in the room?”

“A . . . a very sick . . . woman.”

“What's her name?”

“Jessica.”

“What's wrong with her?”

“Car accident.”

“Where?”

“FDR.”

“What is she thinking?”

Caitlin's voice caught, choked. “How . . . how good her life has been.”

“Why?”

“Because she's had love.”

“Whose?”

“Her husband's. Her children's.”

“What does she see in her head?”

“Her family. Her parents. And . . .” Caitlin smiled. “Summer camp.”

“What is there that makes her happy?”

Caitlin continued to smile. “First love. First kiss.”

“Where are they in the camp?”

“At a dark lake.”

“What's the lake called?”

“Garbage . . . beach.”

“Why?”

“Counselors . . . drink . . . there . . . make out . . .”

Caitlin's monotone and hesitation showed that she was beginning to disassociate from her own life. Barbara wanted to push her further; that was where control lay and guidance could be achieved.

“Do you see them?”

Caitlin smiled. “No . . . I hear them. Sex. Smell them . . . toking . . .”

“Are you contact-high?”

The smile broadened. “A little.” She giggled. “A lot. Whoo! Haven't . . . been . . . high . . . since . . . since . . .”

“I want you to go back further,” Barbara gently coaxed her. “You're floating now, in your life.”

“Gee, Abby . . . is . . . so . . . pretty.”

“Your sister.”

“Baby. Baby . . . sister.”

“Go back further.”

Caitlin had been smiling lightly. The smile left. “Stupid . . . pogo . . . stick . . .”

“Further. You're no longer Caitlin.”

Caitlin seemed to sink into the bed; it was really a long, slow exhale. Her arms rose in unison then dropped.

“What just happened?” Barbara asked.

“China . . . chi gong exercise . . . village . . .”

“Go back again and keep going. Don't stop until you are with Jacob.”

“Polar bears . . . Northern Lights . . . an iron forge . . . wooden boats . . . warriors . . .”

Caitlin's expression brightened, then tensed. This was followed by a slight side-to-side motion of her head.

“I am here . . . but I cannot find my son,” she said, her voice rising. “I cannot see Jacob!”

“Stay calm,” Barbara said.

“He should . . . be here . . . I should . . .
feel
him.”

“Be patient,” Barbara said gently.

“No!”

“What is it?”

“Galderkhaan . . . fading!”

Barbara laid her fingers on Caitlin's wrist. Her pulse was speeding. “Caitlin, you must stay calm. If you panic, you'll break the trance.”

Barbara left her fingers where they were. After a long moment she heard a moan. It came from Caitlin but did not belong to her. It was much, much deeper than her normal voice. At the same time, Caitlin's pulse steadied. Then it slowed. Barbara jumped. Caitlin was staring at the ceiling.

“Caitlin, can you hear me?”

The woman continued to stare. Barbara tapped her wrist. She was striking an acupressure point designed to stimulate the blood flow without removing her from the trance.

“Caitlin?”

The woman did not respond. She continued to stare, unblinking. Her breathing was slow and deep. Then she began to shiver. Barbara continued tapping her wrist with two fingers.

“I'm going to bring you out,” Barbara said. “Close your eyes.”

Barbara reached out to shut her patient's eyes but hesitated; it was as if she was going to close the eyes of a dead person. Instead, she held a finger in front of her eyes.

“Caitlin, it's time for you to come back. I want you to look at my finger.”

Suddenly, Caitlin's arms rose slowly from her sides as if they were weightless. Barbara quickly withdrew her finger, not wanting to interfere with the ideomotor reflex. It was action independent of the hypnotist, often the key to deeply buried conflicts. Barbara watched as her companion's arms formed a circle above her torso and just hovered there.

“They're here,” Caitlin said in a low monotone. “I am with them.”

“Who?” Barbara asked.

“The luminous circle . . . the gold snake.”

“Is this the same snake you saw before? In your vision?”

Caitlin nodded. “They . . . they are real,” she said. “They want me to . . . come.”

“You will not go,” Barbara said.

“I must. They . . . want to endure.”

“You are to stay here,” Barbara said more insistently.

Caitlin was suddenly not herself. It happened in a series of subtle ways as her arms formed the circle: her voice flattened, eyes deadened, respiration grew low.

Barbara grabbed her cell phone and shined the flashlight briefly in Caitlin's eyes. Her pupils were fully dilated yet they barely responded.

“Caitlin, where is the circle?” Barbara asked.

“In awful darkness!” she said. “This is not . . . death! It is absolute destruction! But—my god, it's not the end!”

“Yes, it is,” Barbara said. She pushed Caitlin's arms down, thrust her finger back in front of her eyes. “Look at me!” Barbara shouted. “I'm going to count to three and you will come back with me to the hospital room.”

“Can . . . can . . .”